PROOFREAD your work. If you
ever submit your fiction to a journal or for a prize or to a creative writing
program, you must prune all mistakes, typos, and diction and grammar problems
from the manuscript. A stranger who stumbles over your fiction more than once
will stop reading your fiction or at the very least will think you’re lazy and
unconsciously unhappy with your own writing.

NEVER start an action
sentence with as, the most overworked word in the English language. Here is an
example of what NOT to do: As he walked out the door, she shot him with one of
Cupid’s arrows. Much better would be to say: He walked out the door, and she
shot him with one of Cupid’s arrows.

NEVER start a sentence with a
participial phrase: Aiming one of Cupid’s arrows at him, she couldn’t decide
if he deserved the pleasure. I will always denounce a sentence that begins
with a gerund.

DON’T DO THIS: “Watch how
this sentence works”. Bob said. DO THIS: “Watch how this sentence works,” Bob
said. USE a comma inside the quotation marks and the phrase he said is always
part of the sentence, separated only by this comma.

Use double “quotation marks,”
not single ‘quotation marks.’ The latter is the ‘British’ style and the former
is the “American” style. Never use single quotation marks, as I did to make a
point above with ‘British,’ except when you have conversation within
conversation—Bob said, “He said, ‘I feel your pain,’ with great pleasure.”

Use only she said and simple
speech descriptions like that. AVOID phrases like he squeaked, she
laughed, or Bob bloviated. Draw no attention to these markers,
because they are unnatural out-of-story descriptions, which you want the reader
not to notice.

Spell numbers less than 10.
For example: There were nine judges at the bar. The 10th had passed out on
the subway. But always spell out a number if it is the first word in a
sentence. One hundred and one Dalmatians ran down the street toward me.

Keep your sentences simple
and muscular, especially when they describe actions. Thought sentences (which
describe the internal workings on the mind of your characters) can be weirder
and more disorderly. But when you want to reveal movement to us, you need to
make sure we can see it clearly and without pausing over or untangling your
choice of language.

AVOID using the same words
close together (perhaps even within the same story or novel chapter).
Obviously, you need to repeat some worker words all the time, but when it comes
to less common words, find synonyms or another way of writing a sentence so that
you don’t have to repeat the word. This is especially true for important words,
in your stories. A reader who hears the same word repeated several times within
a few pages will think that writer is lazy. The English language is a rich,
large language, with over one million words (whereas French has only about
one-third as many words and far fewer synonyms than English has).